BMC Buys Neptuny Software to Bolster Cloud Portfolio

The acquisition of Neptuny's Caplan product line will enable BMC to create a new software package for managing hybrid heterogeneous environments.

Another major software vendor has made a move to update its catalog to include new tools for building private cloud systems.
Business service management and automation software provider BMC on
Oct. 5 acquired the software business of Neptuny, an Italian-based
provider of capacity management and information technology performance
optimization software. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The acquisition of Neptuny's Caplan product line will enable BMC to
create a new software package for managing hybrid heterogeneous
environments -- whether physical, virtual or cloud.

Following the acquisition, Neptuny will become the service provider for customers using their products under the aegis of BMC.
Neptuny's software provides around-the-clock capacity optimization,
which helps organizations balance computing requirements throughout
their IT environments. Neptuny also incorporates business and
application key performance indicators with computing, network,
storage, power and cooling metrics into capacity management, enabling
enterprises to better optimize their infrastructure.
This makes it possible for companies to better assess and project hardware needs.

The capacity-planning and management market has been reinvigorated as
enterprises have started to increase their adoption of virtualization
in their production environments, Gartner Research Vice President
Milind Govekar told eWEEK.
"This growth is also due to the interest in cloud (private and public)
environments. Workloads have to be optimized in physical, virtual and
cloud environments to deliver appropriate performance service levels at
optimal cost, without over-provisioning resources," Govekar said.
"Traditional capacity-planning and management tools that dealt with
mainly static environments are necessary, but insufficient to deal with
these new dynamic environments."
Acquisition strengthens capacity management
BMC's acquisition of Neptuny, particularly in the distributed systems
area, will enable BMC to compete more effectively in the virtualized
and cloud capacity management area, Govekar said.
"BMC's capacity-planning products are deep and have breadth on the
mainframe. However, their distributed systems products lacked breadth,
and are sometimes perceived as difficult to use and deploy," Govekar
said. "Caplan fills the technology gaps, but there is also overlap in
some areas, such as modeling. In the performance analysis and reporting
area for distributed systems, BMC resold Solution Labs' Performance
Surveyor product. This relationship has come to an end, because Caplan
also provides this functionality."
BMC customers looking at investing in capacity-planning and management
tools in the distributed systems area should add Caplan to their short
lists, Govekar said.
"Gartner expects BMC to invest in Caplan and continue with the
development team based in Italy. However, those who use BMC's tools in
distributed systems environments should request an integration and
development road map for the two products to take advantage of the
additional functionality that Caplan brings and minimize functional
overlap," Govekar said.
"If the existing tool is underutilized, then BMC customers should
actively look at the option of replacing it with Caplan as part of a
license-swap agreement."

Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz